Google Research: Beware Of Drive-by Downloads

The latest Google report has anything but good news for the antivirus companies: guys, you must shape up! Around one third of the malware lurking on the web actually goes undetected by current software, the search giant stated.

According to the figures provided by the research (PDF),even the best antivirus software (with the latest virus definitions) can provide only a 70% malware detection rate.

Google’s study was focused on the so-called drive-by download web pages, which are able to install and run malware on PCs without user action. At present time, the research states, there are over 3.4 million such URLs on more than 181,000 web sites.

Even worse, the figures are more than likely to grow. While one year ago only 0.3% of search queries contained a link to a malware site, by the end of the year it had already went up to 1.3%.

The study found that the country hosting the most malware sites was China (67%). Next in line (if we can call it this way, given the great distance between them) are the US, with only 15%. Russia came in third (4%), followed by Malaysia (2.2%) and Korea (2.0%).